Forty Years of Behavioral Economics

Abstract

The present article offers the first quantitative history of behavioral economics (BE) from the 1970s to the 2010s. We document the foundation of the field by Kahneman and Tversky in the 1980s and 1990s; the separation of experimental economics and BE in the 1990s; the decreasing importance of psychology in the 1990s onward; and the rise of European authors after the 2000s. Overall, we show that after the 1990s, BE transformed from a unified American research program with a clearly identifiable core, to a multipolar and international research program with relatively independent subspecialties. Despite claims that BE is mostly an empirical venture, we show that the field is heavily structured by theoretical contributions. A handful of seminal models capture most of the citations in the field and explain how the subspecialties in BE emerged, stabilized, and became more autonomous from the historical core.